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Trump insider says ‘some accurate stuff’ in
profile of moribund 2024 campaign
Ex-president calls magazine reporter who likened him
to Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard a ‘shaky and unattractive wack job’
Martin
Pengelly in New York
@MartinPengelly
Tue 27 Dec
2022 07.52 EST
Rejecting a
New York Magazine story which said his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination in 2024 was all but moribund a little more than a month after he
announced it, Donald Trump subjected the writer to misogynistic abuse.
Olivia
Nuzzi, Trump said, was “a shaky and unattractive wack job”.
The former
president also called Nuzzi’s story “fake news”, insisted “her ‘anonymous
sources’ don’t exist (true with many writers)” and said: “I’m happily fighting
hard for our GREAT USA!”
The
Guardian, however, has seen messages in which a veteran Trump campaign insider
says there is “some accurate stuff in” Nuzzi’s piece and, when told “time
catches up with all of us”, answers: “True”.
Nuzzi’s
story, The Final Campaign, ran under a pointed subtitle: “Inside Donald Trump’s
sad, lonely, thirsty, broken, basically pretend run for re-election. (Which
isn’t to say he can’t win).”
The piece
quoted numerous anonymous advisers, including one who said: “It’s not there. In
this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and
it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The
magic is gone.”
When such
insiders were asked why Trump was running for the White House again, Nuzzi
wrote: “Few … are certain of the answers.
“‘It seems
like a joke,’ said one ex–Trump loyalist, a former White House official. ‘It
feels like he’s going through the motions because he said he would.’”
She also
said Trump was “sensitive about smallness” and compared his isolation at
Mar-a-Lago in Florida to the predicament of Norma Desmond, the character played
by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, a movie Trump is known to adore.
Nuzzi wrote
of “a washed-up star locked away in a mansion from the 1920s, afraid of the
world outside, afraid it will remind him that time has passed”.
Trump faces
extensive legal jeopardy, from the January 6 investigation and four House
referrals to the Department of Justice; from the department’s own
investigation; from an investigation of his election subversion in Georgia;
from investigations of his business and tax affairs; and a rape allegation he
denies.
Nuzzi also
wrote that Trump, 76, does sometimes leave his resort – to go to his golf
course in the Florida city of Doral. There, Nuzzi wrote, he “meets regularly
with an impressive, ideologically diverse range of policy wonks, diplomats and
political theorists for conversations about the global economy and military
conflicts and constitutional law – and I’m kidding. He goes there to play golf.
“‘He just
goes, plays golf, comes back and fucks off. He has retreated to the golf course
and to Mar-a-Lago,’ one adviser said. ‘His world has gotten much smaller. His
world is so, so small.’”
Trump still
polls strongly with Republicans, though he now has a serious rival in the
notional GOP primary: Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida.
Nuzzi has
repeatedly made headlines with stories about Trump and his close allies,
including, in 2019, a series of startling exchanges with Rudy Giuliani, the
former New York mayor who became Trump’s attorney and is now in legal jeopardy
of his own.
Speaking to
CNN on Monday, Nuzzi was asked how she thought Trump would react to her piece.
“It’s like
an 8,000- or 9,000 word-piece,” she said. “I don’t know that he’s going to be
sitting down to read it. I think he’ll probably just look at the cover, look at
the headline and think ‘Eh, fake news,’ and move on from there.”
Trump did
call the piece fake news but he also resorted to abuse.
Writing on
his Truth Social platform, the former president said he agreed to an interview
with “a once very good, but now on its ‘last legs’ and failing, New York
Magazine.
“The
reporter was a shaky and unattractive wack job, known as ‘tough’ but dumb as a
rock, who actually wrote a decent story about me a long time ago. Her name,
Olivia Nuzzi.”
On Monday
night, Nuzzi responded – but not with a written rejoinder.
Seemingly
replying to Trump’s claim she was “dumb as a rock”, the writer tweeted two
pictures of Trump at the White House in August 2017, during a solar eclipse.
Trump was
not wearing shades. In both pictures, he stared straight at the sun.
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